Why do we overthink?

[Magi129]

I mean, overthinking seems to me an evolutionary disadvantage, given that if any being spent any amount of time thinking about something that could be thought in less is not using its energy properly. Like, we should think about anything only the much time it needs, and never more, because it would distract us from some important things. If a lion thinks too much on how his hunting can eventually lead to the extinction of the prey, he would probably end the day without eating, and die. How the hell, overthinking stayed so long in Homo sapiens?

 

[EvisceratedJester]

First off, lions don't typically hunt humans. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that this rarely happens.

Secondly, I'd assume that overthinking likely played a role in allowing our ancestors to better prepare for and avoid threats and may have also added in how we socialized with others (such as making it so that we thought over our actions and what we planned on saying to others more carefully as to avoid conflict).

It's important to note that some of the adaptive traits that helped us in the past may not be as helpful in modern-day society. Overthinking might be more detrimental today compared to the past because of the differences between modern-day life and the lives of our ancestors.

 

[SVEN]

I guess the clue is in the term "over" thinking. Thinking itself is just the natural and healthy process which has led us down the evolutionary path to the point where we're chatting online via computers and the internet.
Excess anything, eating, drinking alcohol, exercise, isn't healthy and is aberrant behaviour. So, I guess that overthinking is just another deviation from the norm which presents in the same way any as other obsessive behavioural pattern.

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

Can't speak for anyone else but personally I overthink because I get punished when I don't.

 

[Pluto]

 

[Skallagrim]

First off, lions don't typically hunt humans. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that this rarely happens.

They used to, especially in Europe and Asia in the past. Not just lions, but homotheriums, crocuta crocuta spelaea, and probably Ursus spelaeus all hunted and ate people.

The op is onto something here. The need to act on raw, sensory input, for the sake of survival, probably did not lend well to overthinking. You needed to get food today, avoid the lions today, find shelter today, make a fire today, or you'd be dead. And each day would go like that.

We have much safer lives in the modern era. We can think about tomorrow far more, and with that comes a very strange dread - a constant background of "you need to act on this threat", which you can't do anything about it just yet. It's a strange paradox, but maybe our modern safety gives rise to more stress.

 

[EvisceratedJester]

They used to, especially in Europe and Asia in the past. Not just lions, but homotheriums, crocuta crocuta spelaea, and probably Ursus spelaeus all hunted and ate people.

The op is onto something here. The need to act on raw, sensory input, for the sake of survival, probably did not lend well to overthinking. You needed to get food today, avoid the lions today, find shelter today, make a fire today, or you'd be dead. And each day would go like that.

We have much safer lives in the modern era. We can think about tomorrow far more, and with that comes a very strange dread - a constant background of "you need to act on this threat", which you can't do anything about it just yet. It's a strange paradox, but maybe our modern safety gives rise to more stress.

Not really. If we mainly needed to act on raw sensory input for the sake of survival then we would not have evolved the way we did. The fact that we are capable of higher-order cognition suggests otherwise. In reality, there likely would be a lot of evolutionary pressure on us to be able to able to utilize sophisticated cognition. I mean, for one, humans are an incredibly social species. When partaking in activities, such as searching for food, our ancestors would have been doing so by working alongside one another. Social species tend to have larger prefrontal cortices on average, with our species' prefrontal cortex taking up around a third of our brains. Basically, all evidence suggests that there was evolutionary pressure for us to be able to engage with our environment in a more complex manner and that this likely aided in the survival of our ancestors. It's clear that "acting on raw sensory input" alone wasn't enough for our survival. We needed to go beyond that.

It wouldn't be that out there to assume that overthinking likely played a very important role for our ancestors in helping them navigate social situations and in helping them better prepare for threats. It's not like every waking moment of our ancestors' lives was spent just searching for food and shelter. They would have been doing other things as well, such as taking care of children and the disabled, tool maintenance, participating in social activities, planning, etc. There would have been way more to human life back then and there would have been plenty of times throughout the day when they likely would have had the chance to think about what might happen the next day and the day after that and so on.